Fern had recovered the angel’s sword from the bottom of the lake by stripping off her clothes and diving deep for it. It had plunged like a dart and half-embedded itself in the stony bottom. Blinded by its brilliance, she had swum back to the surface with her eyes closed and carefully handed it hilt-first to Mard, who had found its dark scabbard discarded on the ground near the scene of the fight. Thus shrouded, the weapon was now leaning against a boulder nearby. Fern, still shivering, was squatting against the cavern wall near it, wrapped in blankets and drinking from a mug of soup Edda had given her. Absent was the usual Fernish brusqueness, the impatience that sometimes seemed like outright disdain. The passage through chaos, the angel fight, the intervention of sprite and giantess, the spear of smoke, and the sword forged by Thingor: these were the sorts of prodigies she had been fruitlessly questing after since one such had revealed itself in the sea and taken her family from her. She had flirted with twelve kinds of death and found satisfaction.

“That angel was extraordinarily brave, or reckless, or ill informed,” Edda said. “This is a place of terror to the servants of El.”

This naturally made Prim’s scalp prickle. “Why?” she asked. She turned to Weaver. “What is to be found in this place that is so dangerous to them?”

“You,” Weaver said.

None of the members of the Firkin contingent was in a mood to climb mountains. But after they had rested in the entrance of the cave, slaked their thirst with sweet lake water, and eaten of the provisions that Ferhuul and the others had brought in their canoes, they did venture out onto the beach and climb for a little distance up onto the formation of gray rock from which they had emerged and that formed the abrupt southern shore of Lost Lake. The forest was a mixture of dark evergreens such as they had seen from Firkin while sailing between far northern Bits, and deciduous trees familiar to those who had spent many falls on Calla. The latter were still mostly green but touched with flame in their upper branches. Enough red and orange leaves had already fallen to cover the ground with a patchy smear of color, like paint scraped over bone. The smell of those fallen leaves spoke more powerfully to Prim than any book or song.